Heart Attack

You're at your daughter's wedding and nothing has gone right. The flowers were all wrong. The dresses were late. The Best Man lost the ring while screwing the Maid of Honor in a closet. You know, the usual fare. But after all of the money you spent and all of the drama and the bullshit, when you see the look in your Baby Girl's eye after she says, "I do" you ignore that tingle in your arm. That little warning that might say, "Hey! Something's up."

 

When you're at the reception and the steak is dry and the salmon is cold and your wife is drunk off of too much champagne on an empty stomach you don't care. You don't care because you look at your Baby Girl and she's smiling at you while she's laughing and taking pictures with her friends. You ignore the beads of sweat that pool underneath your arms and the throbbing in your head because she looks so damn happy.

 

At last, when it’s time to gather your Baby Girl in your arms for the Father/Daughter Dance, your heart is pounding something fierce. It's beating wild and crazy and out of control but you know it must because your Baby Girl looks so beautiful on her Special Day.

 

And as the world darkens as you fall to the ground, its okay that you ignored all of the warnings. Because you got to walk your Baby Girl down the aisle. It's okay because you got to hold your Baby Girl in your arms and dance with her at her wedding.

 

It's okay. It's worth it. Because she is happy.

Reviews

[John Lauterbach]

I love the cynicism in this story. The (male) reader is really put into the idea that everything is for their daughter and nothing else matters. It starts funny and gets dark slow, which I tied into the 4th paragraph. (Whether it was intentional or not, I thought it was cool.) There's a kind of irony in the end, because I can't imagine his daughter stayed happy after seeing her father have a heart attack in her arms.

I don't know how I feel about the last sentence in the first paragraph. That is the most lighthearted (ha.) of the paragraphs, but I don't know how much it adds to the piece overall.

I like your style a lot. It's only the second story of yours I've read, but I like that hopeless, cruel-joke-reality kind of thing. "Oh, you're happy on your daughter's wedding day? Have a heart attack."